Globally, the value of assets administered by custodians reaches trillions of dollars. Custodians also process and service financial products and portfolios on behalf of customers. This can be anything to the collection of income arising from a product - dividends or bond coupons, for example - or calculating the value of a fund. Another service provided by global custodians is securities lending. Securities are often borrowed by financial services companies in order to hedge against failed trades, fulfil their settlements obligations or simply to use as collateral to pursue other investment opportunities. A custodian will usually act as an agent collecting a fee for matching clients to suitable borrowers and overseeing the administration of transaction.

Prime services is also another key function for most large custodians. This includes capital introduction - attempting to introduce funds to potential investors; business consulting - advice on market trends and education and training, among other services. Fund accounting and fund administration is one of the most common global custody jobs, particularly in key centres of global custody such as Ireland and Luxembourg, is fund accounting and fund administration. This involves running the books of the funds, ensuring income accruals are all validated and approved. A key skill in fund accounting is working out Net Asset Valuation, which is calculating a fund's assets versus its liabilities. Global custody careers have a number of other functions related to post trade activity. These include settlements - ensuring the smooth delivery of the securities to the buyer and the money to the seller; reconciliations - looking for discrepancies (or exceptions) to trades in order to ensure that the securities purchased match the client accounts; and corporate actions - making sure dividends and coupons are delivered on time. Firms offer sales jobs to bring in the business as global custody is a highly competitive market. These roles are a combination of sales and marketing and, depending on the organisation, can be called business development, client relationship management or, simply sales manager.

Technology is also very important to global custodians so hiring a large number of IT professionals to develop electronic systems is common. A lot of money is spent on systems to aid straight-through processing, where the whole transaction is conducted electronically without the need for re-keying or manual intervention. Some of the more simple NAV calculations can also be automated.